


Valkyrie

by whimsicality



Category: Roswell (TV), The Losers (2010)
Genre: But also hilarious in that train wreck way the losers have, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Explicit Language, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Post-Movie, Well - Freeform, angsty as fuck, i think it's funny, post-show
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-27
Updated: 2014-05-01
Packaged: 2018-01-20 23:04:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1529039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whimsicality/pseuds/whimsicality
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Max has his fingers in more pies than anyone realizes; months after the events in Los Angeles, the Losers run into another one of his victims-turned-enemy and form an unlikely partnership as they all work toward making him pay for the lives lost and ruined.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> See end for trigger warnings and a note on universes if you are unfamiliar with one or the other.

>

**_Exfiltration_ **

_You can't find the tears that ain't coming_  
_Or the moment of truth in your lies_  
_When everything seems like the movies_  
_Yeah you bleed just to know you're alive_

They were checking each room as they made their way down the hallway, silencing, incapacitating, and eliminating where needed. Jensen was just in front of him, muttering continuously under his breath, clearly still irritated that he'd been unable to hack the closed network of the base from the outside. Pooch was next, silent and steady, although his lips were quirked in faint amusement as he too was close enough to hear the hacker's colorful monologue. Aisha and Clay had point, backing each other up as they opened each door and verified that the rooms behind them were empty before moving to the next.

The bunker, which had been built into the side of a hill, was sprawling, one of Max's larger complexes (as far as they knew), and seemed to be sparsely staffed as they'd encountered fewer guards and support personnel than expected. A fact that made the back of Cougar's next itch with paranoia. In their line of work silence was rarely a good sign, and he disliked being in such closed quarters instead of on a rooftop looking at his targets through the scope of his SR-25.

Clay pulled open the next door and stopped in his tracks. Aisha's eyes widened ever so slightly as she stepped closer to see what had caught his attention and Cougar's muscles tightened further as the palpable tension in the air thickened. Silence, never a good sign.

A quick jerk of Clay's head had them all following him into the room, Cougar staying just inside the door so that he could keep an eye on the hallway. As last in, it took him a moment to see the carnage as the others blocked his view, and his finger twitched restlessly against the trigger of his gun as the coppery scent of blood assaulted his nose.

A woman stood in the middle of the room, strangling a man with the chain linking her wrists together. Her eyes were dark, in color and emotion, as she stared at them, the dying gurgle of the man she was killing the only sound in the room other than breathing. She was naked, and covered in blood, bruises, scattered wounds, scars, and tattoos -- a skin deep map of a life of pain.

There were five other bodies in the room, strewn about in poses of violent death, and a moment later a sixth dropped to the floor, face purple and puffy, as the woman slowly raised her hands. Before anyone could speak, one of those five bodies groaned and her gaze sharpened. She turned away from them, tangled dark hair obscuring her face as she stalked toward the back corner where the groaner lay in a crumpled heap, revealing a dozen lash wounds on her back, some half healed, most not. Below the bloody gashes, faint hints of inked wings could be seen.

Cougar glanced out the door to make sure they were still alone, and when he looked back she'd already pulled a knife out of one of the other corpses and was kneeling on the ground, smiling grimly down at the apparent only survivor. He stared back at her, fear and anger writ large on his face as he snarled incoherently. She chuckled, a rough sound that scraped its way out of her throat.

"You were so angry when Max wouldn't let you rape me." Her voice was silky smooth and razor edged, making Cougar wince at the implications of how she'd received those wounds. "And you so enjoyed whipping me. You won't enjoy this, but I certainly will." The knife flashed and buried itself between his legs and the man let out a strangled howl. Cougar fought an involuntary flinch, confident that the man deserved every ounce of pain, no matter who she was. The woman shook her head in disgust as she pulled the knife out and casually slit his throat. " _I_ never screamed."

Wiping the knife off on his shirt, she quickly patted down his pockets until she found a key and then unlocked the metal cuffs on her wrists, leaving them draped across his unmoving torso, the key falling into the puddle of blood between his legs with a wet plop. Rotating her bruised wrists, she rose to her feet and turned to face them, her head cocked slightly to the side, apparently unselfconscious about her nudity and vulnerability in the face of their superior numbers and weaponry.

"You haven't shot me yet, are you here for Max?" she asked after another moment of silence, dispassionate gaze touching on each of them before settling on Clay, who barely hesitated before nodding.

"Well, he's not here, otherwise I would already be dead, but assuming you want information, I can lead you to the computer mainframe and I know the passwords for the first three security levels." Her cracked and swollen lips twitched into an almost smirk as she darted a glance at Jensen, who'd actually fallen silent, and the laptop bag over his shoulder. "The rest will be up to you."

"And what do you want in return?” Clay asked harshly as Cougar checked the hallway again, confident that they would be taking her with them. They wouldn’t trust her, or place her safety above the team’s, but they would also do everything in their power to get her out and prevent her from suffering more torture.

Roque had been wrong, being good guys (albeit ones who could pass for ‘bad men’) was the one thing they refused to lose. Officially dead or not, it didn’t change what they stood for. If anything, fighting against someone like Max, whose very existence spat in the face of everything they believed, made them more likely to do the right thing.

Besides, Clay always was a sucker for the volatile ones, and as far as Cougar could tell, this woman could give Aisha a run for her money in the badass chick department.

One bruised and blood streaked shoulder lifted in a shrug. “For now, I just want to get out of this hellhole. Anything else can wait until later.”

There was a brief pause and then Clay was shucking his coat, stepping closer and handing it to her. She slipped into it quickly, the skin around her eyes and mouth tightening as the fabric grazed the open lacerations on her back, although no sound escaped her, and then zipped up the front with the hand not holding the knife, her frame petite enough that the bulky jacket covered her all the way down to her upper thighs.

“Good to go?” Clay asked, only the faintest trace of sarcasm in his voice, and her lips finally tilted into a full smirk as she waved the hand holding the knife toward the door in the universal gesture of ‘after you’.

Their leader smirked back, but gave Cougar a significant glance as he and Aisha passed him on the way out of the room, and Cougar mimicked the woman’s gesture after everyone else had filed out, knowing that watching her had been added to his duties. She chuckled dryly, but preceded him out of the room, the knife held loose - but ready - at her side.

They made their way down three more corridors following her silent head jerks and finally stopped at a steel door, the two guards dispatched quickly and quietly. There was no one in the room, which was filled with the low hum and eerie glow of many computer banks, and Jensen cooed under his breath as he approached the main console. “Come to papa, baby, you and I are going to make magic together.”

Cougar’s lips quirked into a smile of their own accord at the gleeful look on the blond’s face - irritation, tension, unexpected rescues, none of it fazed Jensen if there was a computer to be hacked. He smoothed his expression and turned his attention back to the strange woman, whose own expression was an odd combination of amusement and regret as she stood next to Jensen, providing the security codes.

The hacker typed furiously, uttering a constant stream of cheerful, disturbingly inappropriate endearments as the glow of the screen reflected off his glasses, the small bit of normality in the midst of the not-quite-right mission making Cougar relax ever so slightly. Several minutes after he had bypassed the last security code the woman had known, Jensen’s fingers slowed and a frown formed on his face as he squinted at the screen.

“Does anyone speak Russian or Czechoslovakian or whatever the hell this is?” he finally asked, glaring at the computer as if it had personally betrayed him.

“It’s Bulgarian,” their rescuee stated before anyone else could speak, her tone wistful as the look of sadness on her face intensified for a moment before fading away into stoic blankness, “and I do.”

Cougar glanced at Clay as she bent over and began murmuring translations for Jensen and saw a calculating gleam in the other man’s eyes. Her knowing the language they needed to access the files had the initial feel of too good to be true, but the physical evidence of torture, and the genuine emotion she’d displayed while killing those men, didn’t fit with a plant. He knew Clay wasn’t happy about trusting her translation until they could get someone they knew, or Jensen to hack a program, to verify it, but the Colonel was nothing if not pragmatic, and her list of skills was growing.

Clearly the woman (and one of the others needed to ask her name so he could stop calling her that, he could hear his madre’s voice telling him how disrespectful it was) was an enemy of Max, and if they could make use of her, then the unplanned rescue might just turn into something else.

A few more minutes and then Jensen was pulling his laptop out of his bag and hooking it up to the base’s computer with a glaringly orange cable, his fingers flying even faster over the more familiar keyboard as he transferred the files they needed.

The entire stretch of maybe ten minutes spent in the room felt agonizingly slow to Cougar, who was still waiting for alarm klaxons to sound and guards to burst in, and when the sound of angry shouting echoed from the hallway just as Jensen was disconnecting the laptop with a triumphant grin, he simultaneously tensed up and relaxed.

 _Finally_. The inevitable had occurred and now it was time to _act_.

Jensen slipped his gear into his bag and picked up his gun, rising to his feet without a word, his blue eyes twinkling with the same mix of tension, amusement, and resignation that they all felt. The woman had stepped back to let him up, but stayed within the five foot radius that Cougar had established, respecting the fact that he’d been assigned as her watchdog. Clay’s gaze slid over all of them, ensuring their readiness and silently warning that they’d better not fuck up and get themselves killed, and then he yanked open the door, the sound of his weapon discharging reaching their ears seconds after he and Aisha vanished through it.

Cougar fell into that cold, controlled place he used when killing, all restlessness vanishing into a vast dark sea of patience, and gestured sharply with his hand to indicate that the woman should stay behind him. She nodded silently and he stalked toward the door, noting that no further gunshots sounded when Pooch, and then Jensen, entered the hallway. Peering around the doorframe he saw Clay and Aisha at the left end of the hallway, next to several dead bodies as they fired around the corner. Pooch and Jensen were heading back the way they’d come in, meeting no resistance so far.

He stepped over the leg of the body sprawled next to the door, and, after checking behind him to ensure that his new shadow was still following, went after Pooch and Jensen. Clay and Aisha were more than capable of handling things on their end, and would undoubtedly join them in making for the exit very soon.

The relative quiet lasted until they were three hallways from the side entrance they’d used, when Pooch poked his head around a corner and then jerked it back with a muttered “fuck,” as the sharp crack of gunfire and incomprehensible yells filled the air. “At least seven tangoes, all armed,” he said grimly, then flashed a quick grin. “But hey, it’s not fifty dudes with AK’s, so we should be golden.”

Jensen snorted and Cougar smirked while their brunette tag-along looked on in bemusement. Then the moment of levity was over and Jensen dropped to his stomach while Pooch started shooting around the corner, drawing the guards’ fire while Jensen picked them off from the ground.

The door next to the woman suddenly opened, nearly hitting her, and her eyes widened in surprise. She recovered instantly and quickly crouched, her hand lashing out and sinking the blade of her knife into the thigh of the equally surprised guard. Cougar finished him off with a point blank head shot that left thick splatters on the brunette’s face. She wiped them off with a faint grimace and then retrieved her knife, divesting the guard of his AK-47 while she was at it and checking the magazine with apparent familiarity.

By the time she rose to her feet, and Cougar had made sure that there were no other guards lurking in the supposedly clear room, Jensen and Pooch had cleared the hallway. Clay and Aisha caught up to them a moment later and they all moved out, Clay raising an eyebrow at the woman’s new weapon before shrugging and taking point again.

The last two hallways were suspiciously empty, despite going even slower to recheck all the rooms, and Cougar’s nerves were vibrating with warning when a faint hissing sound reached his ears and the corridor started to fill with gas. He coughed and pulled his shirt up to cover his nose and mouth - that was more like it.

It had all been too easy. Which happened, sometimes, to other people. But not them.

They sprinted the rest of the way, eyes watering and lungs straining as the caustic white clouds burned their throats. Aisha jerked open the door to the outside and they all took deep, relieved breaths as cold, clean air wafted over them, especially Cougar. Their mystery woman, at least three inches shorter than Aisha and just as tiny, had gotten pale in the last stretch, her hands shaking ever so slightly, and Cougar had foreseen having to carry her the rest of the way.

The relief was short lived. The perimeter guards they’d slipped past earlier had converged on the bunker and only the the cluster of trees and brush that covered the largely underground structure prevented them all from being shot full of holes as they piled out of the door.

Cougar grabbed the brunette’s jacket sleeve, politely ignoring her instinctive flinch, and tugged her along with him behind a pine tree. The trunk of the tree wasn’t thick enough to make him feel very protected, but it was better than half the things he’d taken cover behind in his stint as a Loser, and it was all they had. Everyone else had made it to cover safely and he took a moment to clear the last of the gas from his lungs.

“Fuck,” the muttered word was barely audible, but vehement, and he stopped counting muzzle flashes to determine the number of soldiers long enough to glance down and see the woman standing precariously on one leg and pulling a splinter out of her foot. She was biting her lip while carefully balancing the AK-47 and the knife she seemed understandably unwilling to part with, a crease of concentration and pain between her eyebrows.

“I should have stolen one of those bastard’s shoes,” she commented a moment later as she gingerly set her foot back down on the ground and looked up at him, dark brown eyes glinting with wry humor despite her irritated tone and the unpleasant situation.

He nodded, one side of his mouth lifting slightly, and then returned his attention to the SNAFU surrounding them. No one was returning fire yet, waiting for the guards to start wondering if they’d actually taken some of them out in the first wave, and Clay was having what appeared to be a heated argument with Aisha - he gestured firmly toward the route they’d taken in, which meant getting past the guards, and she pointed just as emphatically to the thicker foliage on the other side of the base, in the opposite direction of their getaway vehicle. Both of them were communicating with whispers even he couldn’t read from the shape of their lips, and determined, angry stares.

“I vote for going through the guards, to spare my feet if nothing else, but I’m holding a bit of a grudge and therefore biased,” the woman standing next to him murmured as she turned her head to see what he was watching, drawing another faint smile from him.

She’d been tortured, threatened with rape, and held captive for at least a week judging by the partially healed wounds on her back, then rescued by complete strangers. But, despite all of that, she still showed spirit and a sense of humor - she was worthy of admiration, and he would not offer protest if Clay did decide to ally with her in any capacity.

Clay won the argument and the plan was communicated through a series of sharp gestures and expressive looks. Aisha’s jaw was clenched and Cougar pitied the men who would go down by her hand. The two of them were too alike, and too stubborn, for their own good, and part of him fully expected to wake up one day to find one or both of them dead at each other’s hands.

There may or may not have been a pool going between he, Pooch, and Jensen, on when that day might be.

He, Jensen, and their tag-along, were tasked with flanking the guards, which, unfortunately for the brunette, meant trekking further into the brush before circling around. He held up his hands to stop everyone from enacting the plan, and gestured for Jensen to take off his shoes. The hacker didn’t move, just stared at him in confusion while the others waited less than patiently.

“Give her your socks,” he mouthed as clearly as he could, and earned a blinding smile from the woman as comprehension dawned on Jensen’s face. The blond quickly tugged off his boots, and then his bright purple socks, balling them up and tossing them over. Cougar grimaced at the smell as he gave them to the woman, whose nose wrinkled even as she turned her grateful smile on the hacker, who grinned back with an apologetic shrug.

A moment later and she had pulled them on, with enough material to spare to fold them down over her feet again, providing a little more protection than only one layer of the thin material would have offered. Clay gave Cougar an approving nod, and then they were moving out.

Aisha, Clay, and Pooch laid down covering fire as the three of them bent low and made their way deeper into the trees, curving to the left as they made their way away from the base. Despite being over half a foot shorter than both of them, and injured, the brunette managed to keep up with their relatively speedy pace (stealth work was never _fast_ ), and Cougar caught Jensen giving her more than one appraising look.

The echoing crack of semi-automatic fire continued, followed by the occasional muffled cry, and the constant rush of adrenaline made the five minute hike under the gradually darkening sky feel like an hour. The ramshackle camouflage of the mercenaries Max had hired to guard the hidden outpost finally appeared in brief glimpses through the thinning trees and time sped up again.

Jensen, a couple feet ahead and to the right, fired first, taking down the closest guard with a perfect headshot. Cougar took out his partner, who turned to see what had downed his fallen comrade, and Jensen kept moving forward, shifting fire to the next cluster of guards as the woman joined in with her AK-47, making short work of the three remaining men in their line of site, their bodies jerking from the multiple impacts as they fell to the ground.

They had to break cover after that, moving forward out of the trees onto grass that had a grayish sheen in the fading light, and was utterly void of anything to hide behind. Cougar shifted to the point position and led them across the barren field at a painfully slow pace, pausing every few moments so as not to draw attention to themselves, his skin itching with the feelings of being exposed.

The air was verging on icy, keeping them alert, and it was that hour right before true dark fell when the shadows blended together and everything had an odd, unreal quality to it. Step by quiet step, they managed to circle behind the guards still pinning their teammates down without being spotted. Several had already been taken out, two by slow-killing gut shots that just screamed Aisha.

Cougar’s eyes shifted to his left and right, verifying the positions of his blond and brunette shadows, and then nodded, his finger tightening on the trigger of his rifle and sending molten metal spewing toward the backs of the guards.

The rest was the work of minutes, the pincer move successfully combating their disadvantage in numbers, and soon they were a team of six once again, beginning the three mile hike back to the truck before more reinforcements could appear. Clay had a graze on his arm, and Jensen’s leg had been clipped, but other than that, and of course their rescuee’s injuries, they had escaped unscathed, and with potentially useful information.

After the clusterfuck their lives had become in the wake of Max carelessly destroying their lives, it was a resounding success.

Assuming, of course, that they could get away with it.


	2. Chapter 2

**_Network Enumeration_ **

_What if people knew that these were real_  
_I'd leave my closet door open all night_  
_I know the CIA would say_  
_What you hear is all hearsay_  
_I wish someone would tell me what was right_

Jensen gave up his futile attempt to hide his curiosity after five minutes on the road, and openly stared at the woman sitting across from him on the truck bed. She was carefully leaning forward so that her back wouldn't hit the side of the truck when it bounced over one of the many potholes, and staring blankly at her fit, his second favorite pair of socks looking dirty and bedraggled after their little woodland adventure.

Her long, dark hair fell in a tangled curtain down her back and the left side of her face had begun to darken -- one of the assholes must have punched her before she slaughtered them (and damn if he didn't want to know how one girl in chains took out sit partially armed men, and see an instant replay of what must have been an epic fight.) Clay's jacket concealed the wounds on her arms and torso, although he could see dried blood (most not hers) beginning to flake off her hands. There was a scrape on her lower left leg, partially obscuring a tattoo on her ankle that appeared to be of a poodle, instantly intriguing him.

Why would a badass chick like that have a tattoo of a fluffy white dog? Was it a childhood pet? Or some kind of mysterious code name from some blackops project she'd been involved in? Had she _killed_ someone with a poodle? _Could_ poodles be trained to attack people?

Shaking off the random train of thought and vowing to do some research the next time he had both free time and an internet connection, an occurrence not frequent enough for his like these days, he cleared his throat. "What's your name? Cause calling you 'the woman', even in my head, seems kind of disrespectful, and while badass chick is an excellent title, it gets repetitive after a while."

The woman's chin lifted and she blinked as she met his gaze, lips twitching as if she wasn't sure whether to smile or frown, a common reaction to his post-adrenaline rush babble fests. "Liz," she said after a long pause, then waved a hand in the direction of his laptop. "But you'll find me under the name Valkyrie in Max's files."

Jensen grinned; definitely a badass chick. "Really? That's an awesome codename, so much better than pinball. Which, I mean, is a cool game and all, old school all the way, but not much for striking fear in the hearts of your enemies, you know?"

The woman, _Liz_ , he reminded himself, blinked again and smiled faintly.

"What is a Valkyrie?" Cougar's low, accented voice asked from the other end of the truck bed, and Jensen turned his head to see the other man watching them, his face stoic, but his eyes gleaming subtly.

Liz's smile had faded when he looked back at her, but she met Cougar's steady gaze and answered quietly. "They were women in Norse mythology who chose which warriors would die in battle, and then escorted them to the afterlife."

"That is a worthy name for a guerrera," Cougar stated with a slight nod of respect, confirming Jensen's suspicions that the brunette had already made a better initial impression with the sniper than Aisha had. Provided she didn't suddenly betray them, or shoot one of the team (even after saving their bacon, Cougar had taken a while to forgive Aisha for shooting Jensen), that respect was hers for life.

The brunette smiled crookedly in acknowledgment of the sniper's words, something in her eyes telling Jensen that she disagreed with the worthiness of the name, but didn't speak again.

The next ten minutes were spent quietly, the last bit of light fading and isolating them from each other as he did his best to rein in his need to fill the silence. When they arrived at the abandoned farmhouse they'd set up camp in, Aisha, Clay, and Pooch piled out of the cab as Cougar leapt out of the back and let down the tailgate, silently offering his hand to help Liz down while Jensen just scooted to the edge until his feet hit the ground.

"Thank ceiling cat for portable generators, I need a hot shower," he proclaimed as he followed everyone into the house. He squirmed his unpleasantly sticky bare toes inside his boots and grimaced as the motion made him notice the burn on his leg where a bullet had clipped him during the firefight. Aisha had jinxed him; he'd gotten shot in at least one out of every three missions since 'Miss I Collect Ears' had gotten trigger happy.

"Me first," Liz murmured, glancing at him over her should with a wan, but teasing smile, raising a hand to her tangled hair. "It's been far too long since I felt clean."

Jensen smiled happily back, used to being ignored by his team, who had learned to tune out his constant chatter when they were all suffering from post-action hangovers.

"How long were you..." he started to ask, then trailed off with a frown directed at himself -- _great job, Jensen, remind her of her time spent with Max's goons, that's the ticket for a cheerful conversation_.

"Three weeks," she replied quietly, drawing everyone's attention as they filed into the main living area, with a table and small kitchen on the left, and an oddly patterned, ratty, matching couch and recliner on the right. She met his gaze briefly, a ghost of a smile on her battered face. "You guys have good timing; they'd gotten careless with drugging my food."

"Why were you there?" Clay asked, leaning against the wall next to the chair, which Aisha had draped herself on, and gesturing for Liz to take a seat on the couch as Cougar headed for the back right bedroom and the first aid kit.

"I was after the same information you were, only I didn't have backup," she answered with a shrug as she sat down gingerly, her tone dry. "Something happened to the bomb I set up as a distraction and they caught me. Max wants to speak to me, so they were going to keep me alive until he could drop by for a visit."

Cougar reappeared and she raised an eyebrow. "I'd love to tell you _why_ Max wants to talk to me, but I'd really like that shower and I think I need stitches first. Besides," she added with a head no toward Jensen, perched on the kitchen table. "'Papa' here is going to look up everything he can find me the moment I'm out of the room, so we might as well save the rest of the Q &A for after that."

Clay grunted as Jensen grinned at the nickname, but waved Cougar toward her and she sighed in relief, twisting her hair into one of those gravity-defying knots women were so good at and unzipping the jacket, carefully pulling it off, then modestly holding it over her chest as she turned so that Cougar could reach her back, the oozing lacerations making Jensen wince. He preferred the whining approach to pain, but clearly this woman was the silent and stoic type, no wonder Cougar seemed to like her.

The sniper carefully disinfected each wound and Jensen knew from experience that while his hands were surprisingly gentle, the alcohol in the swabs stung like a bitch. "There's no sign of infection so far," Cougar said quietly, after he had finished applying the antibiotic cream and was preparing the needle and threat.

Liz let out a bittler chuckle. "No showers, but they did pour vodka on my back a few times to clean up and keep my blood from getting all over their clothes."

"Assholes," Jensen muttered, only realizing that he'd said it out loud when the brunette flashed him an amused grin over her shoulder, earning an admonishing glare from Cougar as she shifted position right when he was about to put in the first stitch. She murmured an apology and obediently turned back around after winking at him, making Jensen grin again. He also favored the humor approach to pain, and clearly so did she.

Pooch started making sandwiches and Jensen pulled out his laptop and cell phone, beginning the process of accessing a satellite for decent internet speeds as he knew Liz, or Valkyrie, or whoever, had been right, and that the moment she was in the shower he'd be called upon to dig up every dirty detail of her life.

Time passed in comfortable silence, and Jensen had already devoured two PB&J's when Cougar finally finished with her back, wiping it down with another disinfectant pad to clean away the drops of blood from the stitches. "Is this a phoenix?" The sniper asked as he pulled his arm back (surprising Jensen with his, for Cougar, unusual loquacity), revealing at least ten neatly stitched, angry red lines, and below them, the inked form of a large red and gold bird that covered her entire back.

She nodded as she turned around, still holding the jacket up. "It seemed appropriate -- I never seem to die, even when I should."

The words were simple, her tone of voice calm with no trace of negative emotion, but somehow the statement was more bitter than her earlier comments about Max's goons had been and it made Jensen wonder just what he would find when he pulled up her past. He could already tell that she would fit right in with their merry band of fucked up misfits who also didn't know when to die.

Cougar doctored the scrape on her leg without further comment and she gave him a tired, but radiantly grateful smile when he finished. "Gracias," she said as he rose to his feet, her accent surprisingly close to Cougar's own, earning a faint smile and a hat tip before Cougar carried the kit over to Jensen and silently demanded that he roll up his pant leg.

"So, about that shower, and maybe some clothes?" Liz queried as she stood up, carefully holding the jacket in front of her, but still revealing more than Jensen was sure she was comfortable with.

To probably everyone's surprise, it was Aisha who answered her. "I have some clothes that should fit, and a towel," she said, rising from her chair with sinuous grace.

Liz smiled and then glanced over at Jensen, who was studiously resisting any and all thoughts that popped into his head as a result of Cougar kneeling next to him, and so stared back at her, grateful for the distraction. She bit her lip and then sighed. "Elizabeth Parker; you'll find more information under that name. I'd appreciate it if all of you forgot it as soon as you're done checking my history -- as far as the world is concerned, she died eight years ago, and it's safer for a lot of people if it stays that way."

"We understand needing to stay dead, Clay said bluntly. "Unless you become a threat, your secret is safe with us."

She nodded and then turned to follow Aisha toward the back of the house. A few minutes later, the sound of running water could be heard and Aisha reappeared, frowning at Clay when she saw that he had taken her seat, before rolling her eyes and propping her hip on the arm of it. Everyone turned to look expectantly at Jensen, who stared dumbly at them, then winced when Cougar smacked the bandage he had just applied.

"Right, information; just give me a second."

"I've heard that name before, Valkyrie," Aisha said into the ensuing silence. "In connection to a failed op when I was tracking down information on Max, something related to bioengineering. It was over my head, and didn't have anything I could use, so I didn't look any further."

"Bioengineering?" Jensen asked distractedly as he typed, skillfully manipulating a program of his very own design that could collect and collate information from the government's official, and unofficial databases, ranging from the DOD, to the CIA and the FBI, to other more obscure acronyms and departments that didn't even have acronyms. "That's random. I mean, we know Max is all comic book supervillain, but I thought he was into bombs, not germ warfare or super soldiers or whatever."

His screen lit up with windows about five minutes later and he grinned. "Who's awesome? Oh yeah, that would be me. Okay, Elizabeth Claudia Parker, born in Roswell, New Mexico -- maybe Max is into aliens too, he seems crazy enough."

"Jensen."

He flapped his hand at Clay, ignoring the thinly veiled impatience in the other man's tone. "She's the child of a Jeff Parker and a Nancy Parker née Cordona, who owned the, get this, Crashdown Café, an alien themed restaurant that Miss Elizabeth Parker and her parents lived above. And there's totally a picture of her in uniform from the digital yearbook, very sexy."

"Anything remotely applicable to how she ended up on Max's shit list?" Clay ground out.

"We're getting there, hold your hoses. Okay, not too much of interest until she was in high school. There was a shooting in her parent's café at the beginning of her sophomore year that attracted some attention; no one was injured and the suspects were never caught. In her junior year, a friend of hers named Alex Whitman died in a car accident that was later ruled a suicide." He winced, imagining how that news must have been received by a grieving sixteen-year-old. "Ouch, that must have sucked. Oh, here's some pay dirt."

He raised an eyebrow, tabbing down the screen as he quickly skimmed the facts before summarizing what he'd found. "Some rogue members of the FBI, who I'm willing to bet we'll find on Max's payroll somewhere, shot up her high school graduation, apparently gunning for Miss Parker and a few of her friends, including a Max Evans, a Isabel Ramirez née Evans, and a Michael Guerin. There were some injuries, but no deaths, and Miss Parker and said friends, along with the sheriff's son and another girl, disappeared, never to be heard from again by anyone in Roswell."

"Is there anything on _why_ rogue members of the FBI would have been interested in her and her friends?" Aisha asked with a puzzled frown and Jensen shrugged, his fingers still flying over the keys.

"Your guess is as good as mine; the FBI disavowed all knowledge of the events, and claimed that the agents in question had been discharged from service over a year prior. Interestingly enough, there was a large explosion at the nearby Rogers Air Force base less than a month before the graduation shooting, centered on a supposedly empty hangar, with minimal reported losses in personnel or equipment. There's no record of the two events being related, but it's an awfully small town to have so much going on."

Clay grunted. "Small town with big damn secrets apparently. Keep going."

"There are no more official references to any of them, except for the female friend who disappeared with them, one Maria Deluca, who reappeared in New York four months later with a recording contract and has had some mild success, and answered _no_ questions about her missing friends."

"Unofficially, the next mention is of a dead body found just outside Edmundston, Quebec that matched the description of the missing Max Evans." He grimaced. "Given the pictures I found, which Max had a copy of in his files by the way, the police could not have made such an identification without help -- there wasn't enough left of his head or hands for them to identify him that way."

He frowned as he clicked away from the gruesome photographs and skimmed through the information attached to them, then felt his jaw slacken into a shocked O. "Most of it's too heavily encrypted for me to read without more time, but there were some... _unusual_ things about his blood and genetic structure."

"Unusual?" Clay asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Well, I'm a tech guy, not a scientist, but as far as I can tell, we're talking either not-quite-human unusual, or the crashed weather balloon left something _really_ special in the Roswell water."

There was silence as everyone stared at him; even Cougar's typical stoic expression was marred by the faintest hint of disbelief. "Seriously, you're saying that the woman in our shower is an alien?" Pooch finally asked, the half=eaten sandwich in his hand forgotten in the face of his stunned incredulity.

"No, I don't think so. I did some digging, and while she has birth records, Mr. Evans and the former Ms. Evans do not, neither does their friend Michael Guerin. All three were found wandering in the desert as kids... kids who strangely did not speak a word of English, or any other language. They were basically blank slates with no developmental skills at all. As for why she was included in the mess," he paused and clicked back to an earlier window, "Well, Roswell High's digital yearbook proclaims her and Mr. Evans to be the 'dreamiest couple', so maybe there were some biological contamination concerns or something?"

"Are you insinuating that I had sex with an alien?" an amused voice asked, and they all twitched in surprise, Cougar, Aisha, and Clay's hands instinctively straying toward their weapons before relaxing as their guest walked further into the room, wearing a tight pair of black sweats and a loose white top, still toweling off her hair.

Jensen shrugged when no one seemed inclined to comment and she laughed softly, dropping back onto the couch. "Well, as unbelievable as it sounds, I did in fact have sex with an alien, or an alien-human hybrid anyways, actually two of them," she paused and shook her head. "Not at the same time though."

Five pairs of eyes stared at her.

"That. Is. So. Cool!" Jensen exclaimed as the silence thickened, and grinned when Pooch and Aisha both shot him disbelieving looks. "So, aliens, tell me _everything_. Are there unusual body parts involved? Extra eyes in weird places? Strange sexual appetites?"

She laughed again. "No, no, and no. But," she paused and smiled sadly, hands falling into her lap as she toyed with the towel, "I did see stars when they touched me."

"Do you really expect us to believe this?" Clay interrupted before Jensen could ask any more questions.

The brunette cocked an eyebrow, smile fading, and shrugged. "I really don't give a shit _what_ you believe," she responded, suddenly sounding tired. "If I didn't have so many scars, dead friends and family, and a life shattered beyond recognition, I probably wouldn't either. All you _need_ to know is that Max wants me, because he thinks I've somehow become superhuman thanks to my dead ex-husband saving my life when I was sixteen. He's wrong, but he's killed or taken away every single person I've ever loved so, rather than disappearing, I've decided to fuck with his life as much as possible."

Her head tilted to the side and her eyes went cold. "I appreciate everything you've done for me, and if you believe our goals are mutually beneficial, I'm open to the idea of working together to take the bastard down -- I'm just one person, there's only so much I can do without help. But, there are only so many questions I'm willing to put up with. I've given you carte blanch to look at my life, to know secrets that _no_ one else alive except for Max knows; I don't think a little trust in return is too much to ask."

"I believe you."

It was Cougar, sitting unobtrusively in the corner and cleaning his rifle. Everyone's gaze shot to the sniper and he shrugged. "Max would not waste so much money and time on something that was not real."

It was more words than he usually spoke in a day, and they made an obvious impact on the other members of their team. "It does explain why the FBI would try to kill high school students, boss," Jensen added, offering his support. "Give me more time to decrypt these files and I'll have more proof."

Clay frowned, clearly not completely convinced, but nodded. "Alright then, I provisionally accept your story. Anything else we should know?"

Liz chuckled softly. "That list could take a while." Turning toward Pooch, she batted her eyelashes. "Any sandwiches to spare for a starving, provisionally not-insane woman?"

"I think we're all provisionally not-insane," Pooch said dryly, standing up and bringing her two sandwiches. "And most people would disagree with the provisionally."


	3. Chapter 3

**_Existence Value_ **

_Just a small town girl, livin' in a lonely world_  
_She took the midnight train going anywhere_  
_..._  
_Some will win, some will lose, some were born to sing the blues_  
_Oh, the movie never ends; it goes on and on and on and on_

Liz never thought she’d be in this position, trying (albeit not very hard) to convince a group of people, an ex-military group of people no less, that she had in fact known aliens, and that yes, her life really was like some fucked up sci-fi action soap. She was more used to spending every second of every day doing everything in her power to make sure that _no_ one found that particular secret out. And, if someone suspected, she was used to doing everything but confirming their suspicions, _not_ laying out the facts for them to analyze and dissect.

It was terrifying, and oddly freeing, as was the fact that she hadn’t been lying to Clay (she’d demanded introductions before spilling her life story), she genuinely just did not give a shit anymore. After nine years on the run, twelve years of secrets, and two lifetimes worth of regrets and failures and deaths on her shoulders, it was hard to summon the appropriate emotions or level of caution.

It was probably a good thing that her parents thought she was dead, and not just for their safety - she didn’t know how to be their little girl anymore. She barely knew how to act human sometimes, and a normal life -- _what’s so great about normal? (she’d been such a foolish little girl)_ \-- wasn’t something she was capable of, not this time around.

She’d caught them up all the way to her high school graduation so far, with more details than the files they’d found had included (minus a few pertinent, and personal, facts, such as time travel), and they were looking a little shell shocked. She hid a darkly amused smile; apparently, her life between the ages of sixteen and eighteen was enough to blow the minds of hardened ex-special forces soldiers... and a whatever the hell Aisha was.

“So then what?” Jensen asked eagerly, the only one, besides the apparently ever-stoic Cougar, who didn’t look completely disturbed at the paradigm shift in his reality.

“Max and I got married, unofficially, at some drive-thru chapel in Texas, and then we headed north, figuring they would expect us to break for Mexico. Life was boring, and crappy. Six people in a van, two of whom are newlyweds, the other couple the volatile type, combined with a wife missing her husband and a smart-ass Buddhist, does not a peaceful road trip make, even without the constant threat of death or dissection.”

Pooch and Jensen both snorted at her volatile comment, shooting expressive glances at Clay and Aisha, and she smiled slightly, thoroughly enjoying the team’s easy camaraderie with each other even as it brought a lump of grief to her throat. “Four months in, the volatile couple imploded for good, and Maria left us to go pursue her dreams.”

Her best friend’s fear of being alone hadn’t been able to stand up to the miserable reality of life on the run, and she’d been the only one with a chance of getting out alive. A chance that Liz didn’t begrudge her - sometimes the only thing that helped her sleep at night was the knowledge that one of her friends had successfully escaped the alien abyss and made a life for herself.

“Five months after that, Jesse, Isabel’s husband, managed to get everything in place for them to disappear together into a new life. As far as I know, they’re happy and alive somewhere, maybe with some not-quite-human kids by now.” She didn’t know where, nor did she want to, mostly because she couldn’t shake the lingering dread that Isabel had actually suffered the same fate as Max, only without anyone left to know and mourn her loss.

She paused and took a sip of the glass of water Pooch had brought her after she’d glanced at the beers the others were drinking and politely declined, organizing her thoughts and ruthlessly murdering unwanted emotions.

“After she left, we decided to cross the border to Canada, put as much distance between ourselves and our families as possible. Max and I were over by then, and he started spending more and more time apart from us. We found out later that he’d been trying to find his son, whom your Max had already found and killed once he discovered that he couldn’t replicate the alien strands of his genetic code.”

“He’s not _our_ Max,” Jensen muttered and Liz rolled her eyes at him, almost grateful for the interruption and distraction from the thoughts of just what Max’s innocent son had experienced before his death. If she let herself think too deeply about certain things, the cold pit of anger in her stomach would start to burn hot, and this wasn’t the time for the willful destruction of people and property that usually followed.

“He wasn’t careful enough and they caught him. You already know what happened after that,” she said with a grim parody of a smile. They’d seen two dimensional pictures of the ruin that had been made of the boy she’d once loved more than life itself. She’d _lived_ his last moments, caught in the grips of the connection he’d unknowingly forged when he brought her back from the dead.

Those memories still woke her screaming on bad nights, the vicious cruelty he’d suffered making her weep and curse her future self and his future self for not being fucking _brave_ enough to change the past and let her die in the Crashdown that day.

Why was _her_ life worth so much?

Shaking off the bitterness that tasted like bile and ash on her tongue, she forced herself to continue. “Michael, Kyle, and I headed for the coast; Michael altered some documents and we caught a ride on a cruise ship bound for Europe. We abandoned ship at port in Spain and never looked back; I haven’t stepped foot in North America in eight years.”

“The first year was about survival - figuring out the best way to make money, the safest places to stay, the easiest ways to stay under the radar while traveling, broadening our language skills, and so on. After that, we started thinking about fighting back.” She smiled crookedly, tucking her still damp hair behind her ear. “It took us a while, we were stubborn and smart and resourceful, but we had no training other than experience, and were going up against a man with half a dozen official, and even more unofficial organizations backing him up. Most of which we didn’t even know about at that point.”

Her eyes narrowed in memory and her smile turned vicious. “We got better though, and within three years we were starting to make a small dent in Max’s operations, enough of one that he started to want us dead, instead of available for experimentation.”

Cougar was unreadable, and Clay was too stubborn to show her what he felt, but Aisha, Pooch, and Jensen, were all displaying various levels of respect and interest and for a second, the surreality of the situation made her want to start laughing hysterically. She resisted the urge, knowing it wouldn’t help her ‘not insane’ case, which against all odds she just might be winning, and took a deep breath instead.

“Two years ago, he succeeded, mostly. We’d been doing freelance work with a couple of mercenary companies for a while, and one of them contacted Max. I was working a separate job, translating for some relief organizations, so I wasn’t there when Max had a bomb dropped on the camp.”

She laughed humorlessly. “The bastards who sold us were lucky he killed them; I’d have made it much slower.”

The five people who’d been equally screwed over by Max, whom she thought might give Kivar a run for his money in the overachieving villain department, each steadily met her gaze, sympathy showing on Jensen and Pooch’s faces.

“And that’s pretty much it. I’ve been working alone since then, no more freelancing. This was the largest Op I’d tried on my own and frankly, if you guys hadn’t shown up, I’d probably be dead too.” She stopped, unable to think of anything else to say; while slightly cathartic, laying it all out like that was making part of her wish that they _hadn’t_ shown up.

She wanted Max to pay, but, in the end, she was just as guilty as he was, and sometimes it was hard not to think that she deserved to die, that she _should_ die, correcting that long ago chance of fate that had stopped her from bleeding out on the floor of her parents’ diner as a painfully naive sixteen-year-old.

“Damn, and here I thought our lives were depressing,” Pooch said with a grimace, making her laugh despite herself. It was a short burst of sound, just a little too sharp, but genuinely amused, and she felt herself relax slightly. She’d stopped second guessing herself a long time ago, it wasn’t safe if she wanted to retain what remaining sanity she’d somehow clung to, and the point was, the aptly named Losers _had_ shown up, and it was time to figure out what she was going to do next.

The others cracked smiles too, or, approximations of smiles in some cases; she had yet to see Aisha smile, Clay’s never progressed past a smirk (painfully reminding her of Michael), and with Cougar, you had to read his eyes.

“You said Max was wrong,” Clay said into the more comfortable silence that followed, an unspoken demand for an explanation underlying his neutrally spoken words.

“He was. Max healing me changed me, yes, but not in any lastingly useful way. Knocking the blonde bitch against the wall was the only active thing I’ve ever accomplished, and not for lack of trying.” She grimaced and shrugged. “As for the visions, I’ve had precisely three since the one that saved our lives at graduation - there are fake phone psychics with better track records than that.”

Finally giving into her exhaustion, she leaned back against the tattered, but surprisingly comfortable couch, ignoring the stinging pains that shot across her back as a result. “Sometimes I get flashes from touching people, if things are heated enough, but it’s rare and it’s random, so not very useful.”

Clay was still staring at her and she bit her lip, wondering how much of her theories to explain. Figuring out why she’d changed to begin with, what had and hadn’t happened, and how it worked, had become a fairly important side hobby since _their_ Max started looking for the same answers.

“The abilities that the hybrids used are all functions that the human brain is capable of if stimulated by the proper, naturally produced chemicals. But human bodies do not produce enough energy to utilize those functions. Our bodies run on the converted energy of macronutrients - carbs, proteins, and lipids - and the bulk of the energy that is produced as a result of consuming those goes to our basal metabolism and the needs of various physical activities.”

Four blank faces and one thoughtful one, Jensen’s, answered her words and she sighed. “We need energy to do anything - breathe, walk, eat more food to produce more energy - all of that requires fuel, and while we’ve evolved to do that fairly efficiently, we have _nothing_ on the metabolic processes of Antarians.”

She shrugged again, one side of her mouth lifting into a slight smirk. “Max was hoping that he could duplicate or breed the genetic strands that gave them the ability to produce so much extra energy. Unfortunately for him, our science just hasn’t reached that level yet, and the hybrids don’t breed true, nor did _my_ Max’s healing change anyone but me. My personal theory is that it has to do with the level of connection he formed at that moment, allowing me to tap into his energy, and don’t ask me how such a connection is possible, but we’ll never really know.”

“So much for my super hero plan, damn it,” Jensen said after a moment, his grin so infectious that she couldn’t help but return it.

“It would only be fair,” she agreed, “Given Max’s villain-like qualities.”

Pooch snorted and shook his head. “Well, as fascinating as this has been, the Pooch needs his beauty sleep, so can we continue the world domination plots in the morning?”

“Sure thing, Pinky,” Jensen cracked, making Liz bite down on a giggle as she silently agreed that sleep was probably a good thing before she hit the loopy stage of sleep deprivation.

“I’ll take first watch, you can bunk with Aisha,” Clay stated before Pooch could offer a retort, the black man settling for glaring Jensen as he muttered inaudibly to himself.

The other woman didn’t look particularly pleased about sharing a room (and Liz hoped it was just a room they were sharing, not the bed, because tonight of all nights, she didn’t think she’d be able to control herself if she felt someone next to her during one of her nightmares), but didn’t say a word, managing an almost, not-quite-there smile as she rose to her feet and beckoned for Liz to follow.

Liz did, and let out a silent breath of relief when they entered the first bedroom on the left and she saw that there were two beds, one of them bare of blankets and clearly not slept in. Aisha picked up one of the two blankets on the other bed and handed it to her, that almost smile a little closer to reality. Liz returned it with one of her own and a soft “Thank you.”

She barely waited for the other woman’s nod before collapsing onto the bed and wrapping the dark red quilt around herself, pillowing her head on one folded-up corner and feeling every muscle in her body cry out in relief as she finally let them relax. She’d been worried that her mind wouldn’t let her sleep, too busy with stress and fears and anger and thoughts she was trying not to think, but five weeks of sleep deprivation and physical abuse won out over her cerebellum and she was out within minutes.

She was flung violently back into consciousness a few hours later, gasping for air and swallowing a strangled sob, the dank smell of sour sweat and the feel of greedy eyes watching her every move threatening to drown her. Ten or so minutes later, she managed to slow her breathing enough that she was no longer in danger of passing out, and she swung her legs off the bed, silently grateful for the fact that Aisha and Clay (now in bed with the other woman), were pretending to still be asleep.

Stepping out of the room, she turned to the left and made her way to the bathroom. After finishing, she washed her hands, rinsed out her mouth, and stared at herself in the mirror. Her skin was pale, barely a hint of the golden sheen that mixed genetics gave her, and there were dark circles under her eyes that had nothing to do with the fist that had collided with her face less than twenty-four hours before.

“You look like shit,” she told herself, and chuckled silently when her bruised and exhausted reflection stared back with a ‘you think?’ expression on her face. Maybe it had been premature to call herself provisionally _not_ insane.

Sighing, she ran her hands through her hair, attempting to tame it into something other than a touseled, slept-on mess, and gave up after only a minute, knowing she was stalling. She could go back to the room and spend the rest of the night pretending to sleep. Or she could admit that she was fucked in the head and go to the living room and be forced to have a conversation with whoever was on watch duty, since she was sure Clay hadn’t gone to bed without waking a replacement.

Neither option sounded particularly appealing, but the thought of staring at the ceiling and listening to Clay and Aisha breathe sounded slightly worse. So she steeled herself for making small talk and left the bathroom, passing the bedroom without a second glance and walking into the main living area with as pleasant an expression as she could manage with memories of -- _no, stop it, don’t think about them, don’t think about what they did, you’re crazy enough already._

It was Cougar who was leaning in the shadows by the front window, rifle propped on the sill, and she felt herself smile, no longer afraid of being forced to talk. The quiet sniper had a peaceful, unobtrusive presence, at least to her, and everything about him, especially his accent on the rare occasion he did speak, reminded her of home.

She was sure his dark eyes had been tracking her from the moment she first stepped out of the bedroom, and he tipped his hat when she met his gaze, before returning his attention to the darkness outside the window.

Liz wandered over to the couch and curled up on one end, knowing better than to turn on a light and destroy his night vision. Propping her chin on one hand, she watched him watching the countryside and worried at her lower lip. Could she really make this work? Could she really handle being a part of a team again, having to take other people into consideration when making her plans, having to listen to orders?

Could she risk actually caring about the survival of anyone but herself?

Snorting softly, she shook her head at her own arrogance. Clay didn’t even really believe that she wasn’t either insane or a liar yet, and she was sure that the others had more doubts than they were expressing. And even if they did believe, and decided that she was useful enough to keep around, there was no guarantee that they, or she, wouldn’t get sick of each other within a week and go their separate ways.

But part of her, the same, stupid part of her that had clung to Max and Michael and Isabel against all logic and reason in high school, was whispering that she could _fit_ with these people. That they were as angry and stubborn and not-quite-sane as she was, and that with them, she just might actually have a chance to make Max pay for what he did to Zan and _her_ Max, for Michael and Kyle, for the lives they all should have had.

It was exciting and absolutely fucking _terrifying_ to feel the shred of hope that had sprung to life in her chest when Clay opened that door at the base and she realized that they weren’t there to kill her continue to defiantly pulse in her gut.

The moral of the Greek myth was all wrong. The evils of the world hadn’t been the most dangerous thing in the box given to Pandora. No, the most dangerous thing was hope - deadly and stubborn and contagious, it could destroy anything in its path, and she thought that the last of hers had died two years before when she’d felt her connection to Michael and Kyle snap with violent finality.

The thick cloud of smoke and the debris of rubble and bodies it hovered over, all that remained of what had once been a camp of nearly a thousand, had sent her to her knees, plunging her into an endless, despairing emptiness without anyone left to pull her out again. She still didn’t know why she’d gotten back up, why she’d driven to their closest safe house, why she hadn’t put a gun to her head or drank herself to death.

Well, that wasn’t quite true.

Michael and Kyle would have been disappointed in her if she gave up like that, if she stopped fighting, if she let their enemies win without even trying to survive, and she knew that. But, if she died in an attack on Max, well, no one could call her weak then. That had been her only expectation; she’d known, deep down, that working alone she would never manage to get rid of Max. But she could cause him trouble, she could ruin some of his plans, and she could go out fighting, the only way she knew how to live _or_ die anymore.

Until now.

Hope, so relentless, so powerful, so indifferent to the pain it caused by not letting her just _surrender_.

Those damn demons or evil spirits or sins or whatever you wanted to call them, hadn’t been let out of the box, they’d fled in fear, desperate to get away from the cheerfully invulnerable emotion left behind.

So here she was, hope’s latest victim, and as she stared at Cougar, a silent, stoic guardian protecting his team, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Should she run away from these people and their possibilities as fast and far as she could, like the evils unleashed upon the world? Or should she crawl inside the box, let hope swallow her whole, and see what fate brought next?

It was official, provisionally was stricken from the record. She was insane, batshit crazy, absolutely, completely, and utterly fucked in the head.

She was _hopeful_.


	4. Chapter 4

  
**_No Man’s Land_ **

 

_Be it the devil or be it him_  
_You can count on just one thing_  
_When the time is up you’ll know_  
_Not just one power runs the show_  


The tiny guerrera had fallen asleep on the couch about an hour after she showed up in the living room, awakened by dreams he didn’t wish to know the details of, not after hearing the brave woman (who hadn’t flinched once when he was stitching up her wounds without anything for the pain) vomit in the bathroom. She had been quiet and not disturbed him, but the staring - something he was usually on the other end of - had been disquieting.

He wondered what she’d been thinking while watching him so intently.

The story of her life, unearthed by Jensen’s talented fingers, and confirmed in astonishing detail by the woman herself, was a harrowing, difficult to believe tale. Although Jensen, who lived in a world of technology and machines, would have laughed, Cougar would have found it easier to believe some sort of supernatural phenomena in her past. Given the spiritual beliefs he was raised with, that would have made more sense to him than the idea of alien life.

The fact that extraterrestrials, _nonhumans_ , had been living on Earth since before he was born, it made his skin crawl. The hybrids, as she termed them, seemed human enough, and had risked their lives to save humans, not once using the power at their disposal in any harmful fashion other than self-defense. But the others she had described, the shape shifters and the ‘skins’, they brought to mind the stories his sisters told him to frighten him as a child, stories of El Cuco or Tlahuelpuchi, monsters who came in the night, who could change their shape and murder children in their sleep.

He could understand why the military would not look kindly upon anyone associated with beings who acted with such callous violence towards humans. What had been done to Elizabeth and her friends, the way their lives had been taken from them, was wrong. But even she had admitted that there were other, far more dangerous aliens out there, and he wondered if anyone in the government, besides Max, was doing anything about that fact.

Jensen stumbled out of the room he shared with Pooch, and Cougar when he wasn’t on watch, and rubbed sleepily at his face. “Morning Cougs, do you remember if we still have coffee? I need coffee. A _lot_ of coffee.”

“Did someone say coffee?” Elizabeth’s head popped up over the arm of the couch, her hair touseled and her eyes locked on Jensen, who had jumped slightly when she spoke. “That sounds _divine_.”

“Drink of the gods,” the hacker agreed idly, frowning slightly in confusion. “Weren’t you sleeping in there? The couch had to be cold with no blanket... never mind, Clay’s not on watch anymore, and I so would not want to be in a room with the two of them. Been there, done that, have the mental scars. I’m going to pee now, and then I’m going to look for coffee. Be right back.”

The brunette laughed softly to herself as Jensen wandered off toward the bathroom, and Cougar had a feeling that she knew Jensen had purposely rambled on once he realized his mistake in calling attention to her sleeping arrangements. They all had nightmares and you couldn’t live in such close quarters without becoming intimately acquainted with each other’s personal demons, a lot of which the Losers shared.

Elizabeth leveraged herself into a mostly upright position and turned to look at him, a small smile on her lips that emphasized the loveliness of her face despite the black, purple, and brown bruises covering half of it. “Thank you, for letting me sleep. And for everything else.”

He nodded and offered a rare verbal response. “De nada.”

Her smile widened. “You’re from New Mexico too, aren’t you?” She looked wistful. “You don’t have to tell me, I just, I miss that sound, you know? Of all the things to miss of home, it’s the accents I miss the most. And the smell, nothing smells quite like the desert, especially the creosote after the rain.” She sighed, pulling her knees up to her chest and looking oddly vulnerable, more so than she had when naked and bloody in the midst of the compound.

“Sí, I grew up in Artesia,” he said after a moment, seeing another battered face superimposed over hers, and remembering another girl who loved the smell of creosote.

Her eyes lit up and her smile reappeared, brighter than before. “Really? That’s so close to Roswell! I’ve even been there for a game when I was dating a basketball player.” She chuckled softly, her expression distant. “Poor Kyle, he got a little too drunk on tequila that trip, spent the whole way back throwing up in the bus’s crappy little bathroom.”

Cougar nodded, allowing a smirk to tilt the corners of his mouth, and ignoring the memories her innocent words threatened to bring to the surface. He considered speaking again, but the wide-eyed look on Jensen’s face (he’d come out of the bathroom when Elizabeth had asked her question), made him widen his smirk and gesture toward the kitchen with raised eyebrows instead.

“Cougs! You’re so chatty lately!” The hacker turned and grinned at Elizabeth as he walked past her. “You should consider yourself very special. It took him a whole week to say that many words to me when I first joined up, and I pride myself on being able to annoy a response out of anybody.”

“That is a very useful talent,” the brunette said in a serious tone. “You never know when the traditional torture methods might not work.”

“Exactly! So many tough guys, all saying ‘pfft, we’re immune to pain, you can’t get any answers out of us’, but let me ramble on about rule thirty-four and the teletubbies for a while and they’ll sing like canaries.”

Cougar shuddered, remembering when the blond had explained the mysterious rule thirty-four (with visual aids) when Pooch got curious one day. The woman on the couch looked equal parts horrified and amused, indicating that she had the same images in her head that he did.

“Yes!” Jensen exclaimed with a fist pump as he dug through their duffel of supplies and food and found the coffee. “Thank god. It’s instant and therefore tastes worse than cat piss - and I can say that with the voice of experience - but the caffeine god must be worshipped.”

Their new companion started giggling helplessly, burying her face in her knees as her shoulders shook, and Cougar saw a gleam of triumph in Jensen’s eyes as he continued to babble on while filling their old fashioned (and therefore useful even when they didn’t have electricity) teapot with water and setting it on the gas stove. Jensen was quite possibly the most skilled hacker in the world and he was also, despite appearances to the contrary, a deadly soldier you didn’t want to meet in close combat, but, in Cougar’s opinion, his greatest skill was in manipulating the moods of others.

Elizabeth managed to get control of herself and moved to the kitchen, perching cross-legged on the counter as she listened to Jensen ramble with an amused smile and the occasional interjected comment while waiting patiently with one of the mugs for the water to start boiling. Pooch appeared soon after, looking decidedly unhappy to be awake, and glared at the cheerfully domestic scene in the kitchen before vanishing into the bathroom, the shower kicking on moments later.

Jensen laughed. “Cougs is the only morning person in the Losers, and I’m not sure he actually sleeps more than three hours a night, even when he doesn’t have watch. Me and Pooch are the only ones safe to wake up from less than a three foot distance - Cougs will wake up before you get that close, Clay will pull his gun, and Aisha tends to stab first, open her eyes later. And all of us are less violent with caffeine; when we weren’t officially dead, it was a special requirement for our field kit.”

“Right, Cougs?” he added, turning to look at Cougar, who just stared back enigmatically, knowing Jensen was hoping his unusual loquaciousness would continue, and finding far more amusement in maintaining his customary silence.

Their gazes stayed locked for a minute, then the teapot hissed and Jensen cheerfully rolled his eyes as he turned around. “Never works, the Jungle Book totally lied; men do not win against cats in staring contests.”

He poured water into Elizabeth’s mug and the other five set out on the counter, the boiling liquid mixing with the instant coffee powder and producing a burnt oil smell that only kind of resembled what coffee should smell like. If it was mixed with rat poison.

“You know, after five weeks of tepid, disgusting water, this might be the most amazing thing I’ve ever tasted,” the brunette woman said with a dreamy tone after taking a long sip from her steaming mug, her eyes sliding half closed in bliss.

“Was it worth burning your tongue for?” Jensen asked with a raised eyebrow as he carried one of the mugs to Cougar, who accepted it with a grateful nod, and a faint grimace, because he thought Jensen’s description as worse than cat piss might be too generous.

She laughed. “I’m from the southwest and spent years living with alien hybrids who even laced their ice cream with Tabasco sauce, or anything spicier they could get their hands on; it takes a _lot_ to burn my tongue.

“Tabasco and ice cream? That sounds like it could be interesting. Cougs had these chocolate candies with chili powder in them once, they were amazing. The others won’t share their candy with me very often though, apparently I’m hyper enough already and do not need more sugar,” Jensen said with a grin as he returned to the kitchen and started making toast. “Amateurs, as if being denied sugar could stop me.”

Aisha and Clay appeared then, heading straight for the coffee mugs sitting on the end of the counter with single minded determination. “Good morning, fellow teammates, or should I say zombies formerly known as teammates?”

Clay shot him a _look_ and Aisha glared, Cougar hid a smirk behind his coffee cup. They should be used to the way Jensen was always particularly exuberant the morning after a successful mission, not to mention discovering that _aliens_ existed last night. Frankly, Cougar was surprised that the other man had slept at all, and wondered how much self control it was taking for him to not badger their potential ally with more questions about her life.

“I have a cache of supplies hidden a few miles away,” Elizabeth said before Jensen or anyone else could speak again. “If one of you would be willing to give me a ride out there, I can give Aisha her clothes back.”

“Field trip! Where’s your stuff? It’s not back by the base is it, because I so do not want to go back there anytime soon.” Jensen had finished his first cup of coffee and poured a second; the long drive they had to look forward to was going to be very loud if someone didn’t cut him off soon. At least it seemed that there was now one more person besides himself who was willing to listen to the hacker talk without threatening violence.

She chuckled. “No, it’s not by the base; it’s in the old cemetery between Stikal and Solishta.” The foreign syllables rolled off her tongue with ease, and Cougar wondered how many languages she spoke. They all knew a few words in a few different languages, but other than Spanish, and Farsi for Aisha, none of them were fluent in anything else. It was a significant handicap now that they were spending less and less time in English speaking countries, and a linguist on the team would be very useful.

“What is with badass chicks and cemeteries? Is it some kind of club thing? Like the equivalent of a secret handshake, or the bat signal?”

Elizabeth raised an eyebrow and Aisha, who had downed most of her coffee, smirked. “Yes it is. I will take her to the cemetery so we can discuss our secret rules, and the many painful ways we know to kill men.”

Jensen’s grin widened and Elizabeth snorted into her coffee mug.

“The Pooch just went to take a shower and now there is talk of killing men, painfully. Requesting permission to go back to bed and deal with this shit later, Colonel.”

“Denied,” Clay replied blandly, snagging the top two pieces of toast from the pile Jensen set on the counter. “We have plans to discuss while the ladies take their little trip.”

Elizabeth wrinkled her nose and shot a wry glance at Aisha. “Sounds like we’re going shoe shopping or something; think they’ll talk about man stuff and scratch their balls as soon as we’re gone?”

Aisha stole the toast from Clay just as he went to take a bite and smiled as sweetly as she could, which wasn’t very. “They’ll probably just skip right to comparing the sizes of their ‘guns’.”

Cougar straightened and prowled into the kitchen, accepting the toast Jensen offered him and looking directly at the women with a small smirk. “I’d win.”

There was silence for a moment as everyone stared at him, and then Jensen and Elizabeth started laughing, the brunette almost falling off the counter, while Aisha grinned at him and winked. “I bet you would.”

Clay looked offended suddenly and then Pooch started laughing too.

Jensen wasn’t the only one who could change the mood of a room with a few well chosen words.

Once everyone had recovered, eaten their toast, and had enough coffee to feel human, Aisha lent Elizabeth some shoes and took the keys to the truck from a reluctant Pooch (who never trusted anyone but himself with their vehicles, no matter how crappy). The two women left, giving the Losers (and Aisha wasn’t a Loser, never would be - trusted teammate, yes, but not one of them in truth), a chance to discuss the latest developments.

“So, aliens,” Clay said heavily as he set his empty mug down on the counter, leaning against the wall and crossing his arms over his chest. “Does this change anything? Do we want to keep her around?” He glanced at Jensen, who was on his laptop again, leg bouncing and making the table rattle. “And keep the references to your favorite movies to a minimum.”

“What about TV shows, or comics?” Jensen asked cheekily, then chuckled to himself when Clay glared in response, looking back down at his screen and pretending to zip his lips.

“She can handle herself and you know we’ve had a few fuck-ups that could have been avoided if we had someone on the team who knew more than ‘hello’, ‘where’s the bathroom’, and ‘we will shoot’ in something besides English or Spanish,” Pooch said from the other end of the kitchen table, where Jensen had set him up with his netbook and a slideshow of pictures of Jolene and the baby.

“Seriously,” Jensen agreed. “And she seems to know quite a bit about Max and his operations, I still want to know how she got those passwords.” He gave them a cocky wink. “Not that I couldn’t have gotten through without them, but still, useful intel.”

Clay grunted noncommittally and shifted his measured gaze to Cougar.

Cougar met his gaze and nodded, silently agreeing with the other two. She was skilled, potentially useful, and she, like them, had only the ruins of a life left, devoted to one purpose - destroying the man who had put them all in this situation. Unless she proved to be liability, or the best liar Cougar had ever seen, he saw no reason why they couldn’t work together to get rid of Max once and for all.

“You know, usually you guys are trying to talk me out of working with a volatile woman,” Clay stated dryly.

“Usually there’s only one problem if you sleep with said woman, Colonel, and as long as Aisha’s around, I don’t think there’s any risk of that happening,” Pooch retorted.

Jensen mimicked a whip cracking and Cougar smirked as Clay sneered before throwing his hands in the air. “Fine, we’ll keep her around, for now. I’m going to go to take a shower; you reprobates clean this place up.”

He stalked out of the kitchen toward the bathroom and Pooch and Jensen laughed. Cougar shook his head, idly considering increasing his bet on how soon Aisha and Clay’s next fight would be as he headed for the bedroom to start wiping things down. Clay was out of the shower in six minutes; Jensen and Cougar had taken theirs the night before, but Aisha had yet to shower, and if there wasn’t hot water when she got back, they would all feel the sharp edge of her tongue.

“So, where are we headed to next, Colonel?” Pooch asked as helped Jensen wipe down the kitchen, once they were all gathered in the front of the house again. “And can we get a new ride? Because I do not want to cross the border in that shitty little pickup; The Pooch can drive anything, but he prefers something with style.

“I do miss that hummer,” Jensen agreed with a melancholy sigh, making Cougar chuckle softly at the look on Clay’s face.

The front door opened, Aisha and Liz filing into the house as Clay spoke again, pointedly ignoring Jensen’s last comment. “We need to find somewhere to hole up while Jensen finishes with those files. I don’t want to do anymore random hits if we can get a list of where Max is most likely be, and what will hurt him most to lose.”

“I’m sure you guys have plenty of safe houses, but I do have one with a decent computer setup not too far across the border in Greece,” Liz offered as she followed Aisha into the kitchen, a dusty black duffel bag slung over her shoulder. She gave a lopsided smile in response to Clay’s answering grimace. “Right, well, why don’t I go try and feel clean again while you discuss things without my annoying presence.”

Jensen winked at her. “Don’t worry, I’m vastly more annoying than you could ever be, and he hasn’t shot me yet.”

Cougar dipped his chin to hide a smile as Aisha and Clay both shot the hacker looks that clearly expressed how often they fantasized about doing just that.

Liz laughed and shook her head, then spun on her heel and left for the bathroom, the five of them remaining silent until the door to the bathroom was closed and the water started running.

“Our closest, actually _safe_ , safe house is in Hungary, boss, so while I know it’s probably a bad idea, we’ll get answers a lot sooner if we go to the new girl’s place,” Jensen stated as soon as Clay waved a hand at him.

“Better climate too,” Pooch muttered as he started drying their mugs and putting them back into their supply bags. Cougar shrugged when Clay glanced at him, not sure which would be safer for the team, and Aisha frowned, clearly unhappy with the idea.

“I have contacts in Greece,” she said reluctantly when Clay raised an eyebrow at her silence. “But we’re already trusting her a lot after less than twenty-four hours.”

“And we do have prior experience in sort of trusting badass women who proceed to lie us and shoot us in the arm,” Jensen snarked, earning a laugh from Pooch, a teeth baring grin from Cougar, and glares from the slightly insane couple that were nominally in charge.

“If she betrays us, we will kill her,” Cougar said flatly, when neither Clay nor Aisha seemed inclined to comment.

The others turned to look at him and Clay finally nodded. “Fine, we’ll go to fucking Greece.”

**Author's Note:**

> There is no actual sexual assault in this fic but it is referenced, in addition with torture (off screen) and intense violence (on screen). It will not be the focus, but it is dealt with, along with the aftermath. 
> 
> For those of you who may not have seen The Losers (or heard of the comic books). First of all, you should watch it, it’s hilarious and clever and one of my top five favorite movies. Second of all, all you really need to know for this fic is that The Losers are a group of special forces soldiers who were framed by a man named Max (super villain type, works for the government and thinks giving terrorists weapons is one way to ensure national security) and were forced to fake their own deaths in order to avoid imprisonment and death. Since then, they have been working to take Max down.
> 
> For a bit more knowledge on the characters, you can read my story Blood, Sweat, Tears, which is canon based and gives my own backstory for each of the Losers. (Also useful for those who have seen the movie, but would like to know more about my version of the characters)
> 
> If you haven’t watched Roswell, well, some of the details will confuse you, but basically it’s about a teenage girl (Liz) who falls in love with an alien after he saves her life, and all sorts of sci-fi inspired adventures and tragedies that follow. The show ended with the group of aliens and their friends/romantic partners fleeing Roswell with the FBI on their tail.


End file.
